Extreme Networks to Close Avaya, Brocade Deals This Summer

Extreme Networks has a busy summer ahead of it with the anticipated closings of its purchases of Avaya’s networking business and Brocade’s data-center networking unit.

In a blog post, Ed Meyercord, Extreme’s president and CEO, said his company is pursuing the acquisitions “with one thing in mind: solidifying our vision to become the only true pure play, end-to-end wired and wireless enterprise networking company in the world.”

“What that means for customers and partners of Extreme, Avaya and Brocade is that you will benefit from our hyperfocus on enterprise networking, our dedication to delivering industry-leading services and support, and our high-quality management, control, automation and analytics software platforms which allow you to simplify and secure complex networking environments,” he said.{ad}

Avaya, which filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in January, entered into an asset purchase agreement with Extreme for the networking business, under which Extreme will serve as the primary bidder in a section 363 sale under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

“If our asset acquisition is approved at the sale hearing before the judge at the hearing on May 25, we look forward to communicating with customers, partners and employees that we are moving forward together as Extreme upon closing,” Meyercord said. “We anticipate the closing to occur in early July.”

As for the Brocade acquisition, Meyercord anticipates closing the deal following Broadcom’s acquisition of Brocade.

“We anticipate a closing within 30 days of Broadcom’s acquisition of Brocade, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions,” he said. “We anticipate that the transaction will close in August 2017.”

Texas-based Solid IT Networks, which sells, implements and designs enterprise-class wired and wireless networks, has been a longtime Extreme partner. J. Dee Flamming, its vice president and director of sales, said the acquisitions are good news for his company.

“The Avaya play as we see it, they have some very interesting fabric capabilities, almost more in the service provider or metropolitan area network space, which we found very interesting,” he said. “They also, at least in the state of Texas and in particular major geographies, are pretty big in some verticals including education, which is one of our big verticals, so we’re looking forward to being able to see how we can support that customer base.”

As for Brocade, Solid IT has been promoting the company’s data center products for more a decade, Flamming said.

“It’s been our lead data center solution set, so it’s going to be business as usual for us and we think the world of that product line,” he said. “The MLX is outstanding, the BDX does some things with fabrics, and its relationship and integration with VMware that are just outstanding, and we can’t wait to get our hands on SLX. So from that point of view, we’re real excited that they landed with Extreme, that’s an IP company that really doesn’t have in any way, shape or form a competing product set with that. It’s like plus new business all the way across from an Extreme point of view. They really couldn’t compete in that marketplace with the products that they had.”{ad}

There hadn’t been a service provider-class data center offering from Extreme, so “I think there’s immense opportunity within the existing Extreme clientele to expand that base now that there’s truly world-class data centers that they’ll be able to bring to their customers,” Flamming said.